Agnotologically Speaking

Tell the truth and shame the internet.

Perhaps the greatest irony of the modern age is that technology which was created to propagate knowledge is used so often, and so effectively, to spread lies.

Tech aside, our species has always had a complicated relationship with the truth. In laws both religious and secular, truthfulness has never been categorically mandated. Specific types of lies are proscribed, such as bearing false witness or shouting about a nonexistent fire in that proverbial movie theater. But in no canon are we told we must always tell the truth, no matter the circumstances. Take it a step further–many Americans would claim that their right to lie is enshrined in the First Amendment, providing the lie wasn’t violating any other enumerated laws. And there’s an almost universal tolerance for the “white lie,” the harmless falsehood told as an expediency or to spare someone’s feelings.

Given that history, it shouldn’t be a surprise that when humanity is given bigger and better soapboxes, bigger and badder lies spew forth.

Technology, then, has always been an enabler. The dawn of broadcasting, radio and television, brought mass audiences, and before long, mass deception.

In the mid-1990s we the people first began accessing a fast-growing computer network that had been built for purposes almost directly antithetical to the duplicity of which we speak. The internet began as a resource for universities and researchers to share data and ideas.

Once it morphed into a more public forum, the sadly inevitable happened. Disparate groups took to the medium to spread untruths, half-truths, and self-serving fabrications. Their motivations have varied–politics and prejudice, conspiracy-mongering and the proliferation of crackpot ideas. But arguably the most common reason is also among the sleaziest: the pursuit of the quick buck.

The phenomenon is familiar enough that it’s spawned its own field of study: agnotology. The word was coined by Stanford historian Robert Proctor, based on his review of the tactics employed by the tobacco industry in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s to sow uncertainty in the public’s mind about the health risks of smoking. It refers to the deliberate, deceitful act of spreading doubt, or agnosis, usually for material gain.

And although this dark discipline came to the fore in the Reagan era, Proctor and his fellow agnotologists agree that our present information age marks the maturity of mass deception.

Make no mistake, these developments are every bit as grim as they seem. But take heart in this glimmer of hope: the very tools that are used to delude us can be leveraged for the sake of veracity.

By this we mean: the truth is in here. Despite all efforts of the dissemblers, the ‘net fulfills its purpose of sharing knowledge–sharing truth–but it is incumbent upon the seeker to find that truth.

Look then, for credible sourcing. Look for multiple sourcing. Consume content discerningly, and operate under the credo that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Trust your instinct to know when you’re being led down the garden path. Rest easy in the knowledge that although they may lie to you, you can control whether or not you’re misled.

It’s a crying shame that we are where we are, that such a powerful resource for human connectedness is being used for such inhumane deceit. But crying never solved anything, did it? The only solution is our joint resolution to reject guile and hypocrisy, and to reclaim the global conversation, in the name of the truth.

The C4:
1. Lies are as old as mankind. We could try to excuse or rationalize that, but there’d be no truth in it.

2. Instead, by necessity, we’ve learned to live with the lies. They’re like viruses: undesirable and unhealthy; we convince ourselves they’re rarely lethal, and that they’re unavoidable.

3. If that is so, then we have here in the digital realm the most welcoming petri dish imaginable for perfidy. The information age might well be remembered as the Golden Age of B.S.

4. Liars gonna lie. We can’t put this poisonous genie back in the bottle. But rather than abandon the internet to the liars and the cheats, we can arm ourselves with the truth. We can become integral to the solution rather than contributing to the problem. Help us, please. A more honest internet–a more honest world!–depends upon us all.

Fractal Hunting

The human search for pattern

It took a mathematician to tell us why we love the art of Jackson Pollock.

That the subject is under discussion is evidence, we suppose, that not everyone is as enamored as we with the work of the great mid-century action-painter, expressionist. Where we see a hypnotic and original style of painting, others see disordered dribbles and splashes of pigment, more suggestive of a studio mishap than deliberate art. Why, one philistine of our acquaintance even threatened to haul his oft-used, crusty drop cloth out of the basement, forge Pollock’s signature to it, and try his luck selling it to MoMA.

Cretins like that aside, Pollock’s body of work is celebrated world wide by lovers of modern art. And art being art, it almost seems antithetical to examine the reasons why.

But there’s a hidden logic to aesthetic rules or at least guidelines that govern what we find pleasing to the eye or ear, even though we’re often quite unaware of it.

In the case of Pollock, there’s no overt symmetry or pattern we can cling to which would seem to explain the allure. Or is there?

Fractals are a relatively new (or newly recognized) family of geometrical designs, defined as patterns that repeat themselves at any scale. The most familiar ones, such as the Mandelbrot set, are purely imaginary, existing as computer models and born from complicated mathematical formulae.

But then fractal hunters noticed something amazing: Fractals do exist in the real world, and they’re far from rare.

Look at that tree outside. The trunk sprouts limbs, from which sprout branches, then twigs. Zoom in on any of those twigs, and see how it mimics, in its abbreviated way, the propagation of the greater tree.

Or pick up a rock, one no bigger than your fist. Bring it in close and get a good look. Then try to imagine what would distinguish it from a multi-ton boulder sitting a few yards away.

The scales change. The patterns do not.

Which brings us back to Pollock. The man shuffled off his mortal coil back in 1956 so we can’t be sure if he was aware of it, but turns out, he was making fractals too.

Dr. Richard Taylor from the University of Oregon’s Department of Physics was the first to demonstrate this back in 2011. Lacking the ability to mimic Pollock’s technique by hand, he built a paint-spattering rig (he calls it the “Pollockizer”) that fairly accurately reproduces this signature style. And he found that what makes a Pollock a Pollock is the depth of saturation. And the randomness? It’s illusory. Patterns assert themselves. Perhaps most importantly, like fractals, they do so at scale. Slice out one square inch of a Pollock canvas (actually, please, don’t)...enlarge it, and compare it the original. You’ll find they’re twins.

There is indeed a point here, and it’s as relevant to business and human nature as it is to art. We are pattern-seeking creatures. Unlike most mammalians our olfactory prowess is pretty feeble. Our hearing likewise leaves a lot to be desired. We rely instead on sight. We depend upon our eyes to provide timely input on whether that face down the block is a familiar one, and whether it belongs to a friend or foe. We need to know if a vague shape in the leaves where we’re walking is a stick, or a deadly viper.

This has evolved into an amazingly versatile faculty. We’re not just able to see shapes and faces floating in the clouds, we can find revelation and courses of action hidden in reams of raw data. We can wade through noise, through chaos, and find that no, it’s actually information.

Savants like Jackson Pollock need not understand the theory behind the pattern-making. Neither do we. This is our natural element. And just as easily as he dipped his hands and splashed the paint, we too can dip into the seeming tumult, and make sense of it.

The C4:
1. Chaos Theory (a close cousin of fractal theory) tells us that chaos itself is a rare bird indeed. Nature abhors randomness. Order asserts itself, even when, on the surface, disorder seems to abound.

2. Just knowing this offers an advantage—in the business realm, certainly, but just as certainly in every other realm of human endeavor.

3. Finding signals in the noise takes a bit of a knack, perhaps, but no special training or aptitude. All it really requires is the willingness to try, and the conviction that doing so will be worth it.

4. Jackson Pollock (Jan. 28, 1912 - Aug. 11, 1956) was an American painter and one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. He may or may not have consciously pioneered the aesthetic use of fractal design. Does it matter? You can lose yourself in his Full Fathom Five without ever needing to know exactly how he created it.